Notes from a Room

Looking back over his life, X tells me, he’s horrified. All this time he’s been secretly thinking how clever he was without realising how stupid he really is. It’s amazing how little he knows about himself, he says. Even now I might be thinking how clever I am for realising how stupid I am without knowing it, he says. Tomorrow I might look back on this moment with horror, he says. In fact I already do. I think I’m being humble when I’m just laying the ground for more humiliation. No one should think, he says, we should just take on the colours of the world and disappear against the backdrop like chameleons. Thinking is a curse, he says. But maybe he just needs to get laid, he says.

Looking over his life, X is embarrassed, he tells me, and sorry for everything he’s said, done and felt. He now realises he’s basically stupid. He’s in one of those moods, he says, when his whole life seems shameful, as if he’s an absurd interloper who has no place here, wherever that is, he says). And of course this thought is shameful in itself, he says, it’s shameful that he should have to feel this way, yet it’s right and proper, because he’s a scandal, a scandal against nature.

X has proved nothing in all this time, he tells me, nothing but his own inability to know and speak. Others may well be able to know and speak, he doesn’t know. At least they seem convinced that they are. All that seems left for him at the moment, he says, is to erase himself in the distance between himself and conviction, to drift, go into mourning for what he loved, and greet any reemergence of what was renounced with the peace of the graveyard, the temptation being to think he’s special for doing so or that it shows any kind of wisdom. Or maybe he just needs to get laid, he says.

X tells me he sees his life as a number, perhaps an infinite number, of circles within circles. He’s somewhere inside the inner circle, he says, and reality is somewhere inside the outer circle. The intermediate circles, perhaps an infinite number of them, buffer him, distance him or keep him on the brink of reality, perhaps all at the same time, since the spaces between them may be vanishingly small or infinitely large, he doesn’t know. All his words and movements have to pass through these circles, he says, so that by the time they reach the outer circle there’s been a kind of lapse, a reverberation, the way the sound of a shout is buffeted across a windy street or the way an echo travels. That’s why when he moves his hand out to shake someone else’s he sometimes feels dizzy; he finds himself shaking hands and isn’t sure how long it’s been since he first started reaching out; it’s why he walks around in a kind of haze, he says, why people think he’s slow: he’s on a listing boat while others seem to walk on land.

X tells me he doesn’t like to imagine other people’s lives, the minds of others. He can’t even think about it for too long. The very idea’s like a threat, he mutters. He can only relate to people who think exactly like him, he says, and of course no one does, there’s always a remainder, something that doesn’t quite fit, that threatens his peace of mind. The idea that other minds exist unsettles him, he says, horrifies him. He’s learned not to trust the similarities between himself and others, he says. So he puts a buffer between himself and others, he says. What else can he do? he asks. Even an empty fortress is better than the alternative, he says, the awful strangeness of another mind.